Pray For Japan. Or Maybe Do Something That Actually Helps.

I’m getting sick of seeing “Pray for Japan” signs and slogans everywhere on the Internet. How is praying for Japan going to help? If god actually cared about Japan in the first place he wouldn’t have allow the earthquake and tsunami to happen so why ask him now to help people he obviously was intent on destroying in the first place? Unless he didn’t want the earthquake and tsunami to happen, then he is not all powerful so why bother asking him to intervene? If he didn’t have the power to stop it in the first place what makes you believe that he can do anything to help now? Ah, you say, the earthquake and tsunami were his will. Well then, if it was his will, the why try to get him to do anything since whatever is going to happen is also his will so prayer wouldn’t make a difference anyway.

Prayer by its very nature is an attempt to get god to do something that we want him to do, or in other words, to try to get him to change the outcome of a future that he has already planned out anyway. In this case then, prayer is useless. God has decided what will happen and asking for things to work out differently than what he has planned is useless, so therefore prayer is useless. The only reasonable course of action in a universe with an all-knowing god is to just go with the flow. If you pray and it works out how you wanted, it was going to be that way anyway so your prayer effectively had no effect. If you pray and it doesn’t work out the way you wanted then it wasn’t god’s will and again, your prayer had no effect. Praying does nothing to help or change anything because god has already decided what is going to happen anyway. Of course all this assumes that an all-powerful, all-knowing god even exists. You all should know by now how I feel about that.

If you really want to help Japan, donate time or money to organizations that are actually doing something to help. Pray if it makes you feel better, but don’t assume that your prayer will in anyway help anyone.

First God is not punishing anyone right now… he will but not yet
second…bad things happen begause we live in a world that is cursed.
Prayer is not a “fools way of altering the unalterable future etc.”
I see miracles everyday…unexplained by folks with your opinion… documentated facts that all your hatred cannot change.
I see them everyday.
Prayer changes things.

Your comment here is a prefect example of why I have problems with your world view. You claim a loving god, but then say he will punish people at some point in the future.

As for you seeing things that you can’t explain, just because you can’t explain them doesn’t mean that god did it. It just means that, at this point in history, we are unable to explain them. People used to think that illnesses were caused by demons or humors because they couldn’t explain illness any other way. Eventually we discovered the germ theory of medicine which perfectly explains it. To say that “god did it” just because we can’t explain it is an intellectual cop out. It allows us to abandon our reason and intellect and just throw up our hands and walk away when we are stumped by something we can’t explain. The key is to keep asking questions; to keep studying, learning, and thinking about the problem. An answer, an empirical one bound in reality, will eventually reveal it’s self. When we surrender our reason and intellect due to ignorance and laziness we become as children, who will believe any fairy tail, instead of the mature, thinking adults that we can be.